How To Rip Your CDs to MP3 – Free!

Did you ever want to Rip your favorite CD to MP3?

As I’m sure you have many old music CD’s laying around there are good reasons to convert them to MP3 files that you can listen to on varying devices. Not only does it give you this flexibility but it keeps you from wearing out the CD’s themselves.

Here’s a great way to safeguard your old audio CD’s.

FreeRIP is a program that will copy all those old favorites over to your PC in several different formats. Once that is done, you can listen to your music on any device capable of playing MP3 files.

Note: FreeRIP can also convert files to other formats including WAV, WMA, and FLAC

What is RIPping?

Ripping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media such as CD or DVD, although the word refers to all forms of media – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripping

Enter FreeRIP

FreeRIP is a simple program. It does one thing and it does it very well.

FreeRIP Installation

The above image is what you will see when you begin your FreeRIP installation. Please take note of the opportunity here to choose an installation directory.

There are many good reasons to not install programs on the same hard drive as your Operating System. Dave’s Computer Tips has several articles that can steer you in the right direction, here and here for starters.

A Familiar Warning

Once again, I have to remind you of the sneaky ways some installers try to get you to opt in to some Toolbars, Taskbars, and various other means to infiltrate your system.

Many of these ‘Sneaky Petes’ are generally harmless, however, to simply avoid clutter and to stay in control of your computer I always strongly suggest to not install anything but the program itself. If you agree with me, when this screen presents itself, click the Decline Button. As always, the choice is yours.

FreeRIP Setup and Use

If you are reading this article and happen to be a rocket scientist you probably won’t be able to use FreeRIP. It’s just too simple for you- sorry.

For the rest of the masses who eat cake, just stick a music CD in your optical drive and FreeRIP lists the songs.

There are a few default settings that I’d like to talk about, though. Namely, where it will send the RIPped MP3 files. By default, they will get sent to your desktop. I don’t know about you, but that most certainly is not where I want them to go.

To get to the Settings Menu in FreeRIP, click the File Menu indicated in the above image. Then you’ll see this:

There are 3 main points to take note of here:

Default encoding – Set it to the one you want as your default option. I like MP3 for use on my PC.

Output folder – I choose a work folder for this purpose; I sure as heck don’t want them on my desktop!

Default volume – I have played around with this and find 75% works well; this is totally a ‘by guess and by gosh’ option. You will have to experiment to see what suits your particular environment best.

Usage

Once you have your choices defined, and your favoritest, mostest, bestest music is lined up for RIPping, a single click starts the process. I’ve found it generally takes around 3 minutes or less to rip a CD. Your times may vary depending on your computer, However, even if it took a staggering 10 minutes, wouldn’t that be worth it?

An aside: The above paragraph wreaked havoc with my spell checker. I love it! I had red squiggly lines all over the place! I may just add those words to my dictionary; Merriam-Webster does.

Conclusion

I love programs like this. They do one simple thing and they do it very well. I would much rather have 10 programs that do one thing well than one program that tries to do everything poorly. (Some recent AV and Firewall packages immediately come to mind.)

Honestly, I can’t think of a single reason to pay for it. The version comparison available on their web site gave me no impetus to do so. Basically, speed seems to be the greatest advantage. Didn’t I already mention that it took an intolerable 3 minutes? Hmmm… 30 bucks?! I don’t think so.

About the Author

Richard received his first computer, a C-64, in 1982 as a gift and began dabbling in BASIC. He was hooked! His love for computing has led him from the old “XT” boxes to the more modern fare and from clunky 10MB hard drives to smooth and fast modern day SSD drives. He has run BBS services, Fido mail, and even operated his own computer repair business.

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